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The Box Brownie and the Dead Tree Press.

I wonder how Steve Sasson is feeling on this gloomy morning for Kodak? I’ve just unearthed a 2007 article he wrote for Kodak’s internal blog entitled ‘We had no idea’. What prescience Steve!

We love what we do, and we want to share our expertise about digital imaging’s technologies and its power to influence our world.

5 years later, and the digital camera he helped to invent has been the death of probably the most famous name in photography. When the Box Brownie first emerged in the 1890s, it came accompanied by the slogan ‘You Press the Button, We do the rest’; a recognition by the company that they were only selling you the means to take a picture – you still needed them on an ongoing basis. You still had to buy film, you had to return the film to the company to be developed. Kodak were purveyors of the means of turning that button press into a picture that you could see – you had merely bought the button! The invention of the digital camera wiped out a captive class of regular customers.

Kodak’s mistake was in seeing themselves as camera retailers, and forgetting that this was only a minor part of their income.

It is exactly the same rabbit hole that the Dead Tree Press have been driving themselves down since the Internet began. The media imagine that they are in the business of purveying news. They aren’t. News is merely gossip – the stuff of ‘have you heard’, that has been passed from man to man, hill top to hill top, ship to ship, since time immemorial. They are actually glorified advertising agencies, providing the paper communication between buyers and sellers, something E-Bay does spectacularly well.

If they had woken up to that fact in the early days of the Internet, they might have reformed themselves into sensible companies using their expertise at directing advertisers towards likely groups of customers, instead of the present gloomy spectacle of partisan repetition of what is already available on Twitter and Youtube 24 hours later.

The coverage of the Costa Concordia disaster has been a prime example. The graphic coverage is courtesy of those passengers who, fearing for their lives, queuing for the lifeboats, still whipped out their mobile phones to take video coverage on the off chance that they might survive and make a fortune on Youtube, Twitter speculation as to ‘who should hang’ for the accident, and Facebook coverage of leaked transcripts of semi-official interviews. The Dead Tree Press have had nothing of interest to add to what had been available on social media hours earlier.

Why would we want to buy a paper version of selected advertising when we can Google the item we need and go straight to an advertisement – and probably an on-line shop – in an instant?

I note that The Times is now so desperate to get it’s advertiser’s copy into your home that they are promising to push it through your front door ‘before 7am’ via a ‘liveried van’ no less – free of charge, if you would just be kind enough to buy a subscription towards the cost of printing those adverts…….

I’m sure we’ll remember them as fondly as we remember the Box Brownie.

Any other businesses you can identify as having a mistaken view as to their function? (other than HMG of course!!!)

{7 comments }

MudpluggerJanuary 20, 2012 at 21:50

Kodak is similar to the position in which the mechanical watch industry found itself as the Japanese digital watch wiped it out in a few short years. It has only survived now as a niche, outrageously overpriced, poseur product for footballers while anyone who just wants to tell the time uses one of the many cheap and accurate digital devices now available.

Kodak’s mistake was in thinking people wanted ‘cameras and film’, whereas in fact they only wanted ‘images’. Just like electric drills – no-one ever really wants an electric drill, they actually want holes, the drill is merely the most convenient means available to achieve that need. When folk wanted ‘images’, then for 100 years Kodak’s camera & film configuration delivered it, but only until something more convenient came along, when Joe Public revealed that they didn’t really want film, they just wanted images. Sadly Kodak didn’t realise what their customers really wanted, they were too busy concentrating on what they had to sell to them, hence the receiver beckons.

M BarnesJanuary 21, 2012 at 16:08

Good analysis. If Kodak had understood what customers wanted, they could have been at the forefront of the digital revolution. Receivership wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

AntisthenesJanuary 19, 2012 at 10:12

The internet is changing the face of shopping, the music and film industries and no doubt many other things. The US congress is about to try and change some of that with Chinese style internet censorship legislation. It seems the internet was also allowing too much democracy to creep into places where there is none and where there is democracy exposing the fact that it is not democratic enough. World leaders are not happy and will do everything they can to mute the picture that the internet gives the individual as it exposes too much of their failings. Watch this space as I predict soon you will not be allowed to surf the net where you want to go but where officialdom want’s you to go.

M BarnesJanuary 19, 2012 at 10:11

I am not so sure Kodak mistook their function so much as failed to understand the basic tenet of life – adapt or die. Kodak is often used in business circles as the perfect case of a failure of management vision. They invented a prototype and registered the patent in 1975 – way before the idea of homes having even one ‘personal computer’ let alone many. Mobile telephones? Don’t be ridiculous.But what Kodak failed to do was review their patents as technology developed. They did not think Moores Law applied to them, they did not see opportunities in the development of PC’s. They failed to appreciate that every business has to adapt from it’s original format and they failed to see the development of digital as an opportunity – they just saw it as a threat. Instead of jumping whole-heartedly and getting ahead of the pack, they dug a hole and had to be gragged kicking and screaming into the backside of the digital revolution. Instead of re-inventing themselves they developed printers and paper for printers while others galloped over the hill.The reason Kodak is discussed so much in business circles is that it is an example of how senior management mindset can doom a company long before the actual agent of that doom (in this case the digital camera) appears.As for the Press versus Blogs and Internet – I am extremely sceptical of anything I read from a purely internet source. At it’s best the internet puts information in the hands of the people to take action on. The flipside of this is, if that information is inaccurate, it creates a mob, it re-writes history, fact is lost and myth takes over. The internet is frequently inaccurate and easily manipulated. A petty example of this is Mr Hari of the Independent and a few authors rubbishing their rivals books via fake reviews. If a government ever gets clever about this, you have 1984 in pixles rather than ink. So I hope the press adapts and survives because I think they are on the whole more professional about their fact-checking and writing.

Take the Iraq war. Overwhelming evidence was in the public domain that no WMD’s existed, the evidence was even publicly verified by Mossad. Yet the press never questioned statements made by MP’s about WMD’s. To be fair the BBC did mention the report once during a program at 3am

Even something very simple like the total number of road deaths per year the above organizations cannot get correct. I’ve seen the figures reported as weekly or monthly rather than yearly. I’ve seen the same figures used as total no of child road deaths (rather than all deaths).

Or how about the recent debate over the alcohol figures. The press have been blindly reprinting the figures, bloggers have been researching the figures and (rightfully) calling it as BS.

The Guardian recently had a piece about how difficult it was for poor little journalists to understand basic GCSE maths. Yet they bleat on about how important the free press is for democracy; but never sanction journalists for very basic factual failures.

Or how about this blog and the excellent articles about the court of protection? The press kept away from that story for a long time.

The press, in its current form, is dysfunctional which becomes obvious to anyone with basic critical thinking skills and a web browser.

Increasingly the press are being viewed as part of the “establishment” because they cannot be trusted to simply report the unbiased truth. This has created an “information” vacuum which has been mostly filled with websites publishing disinformation and down right lies.

Post internet the press can only survive by starting to care more about the facts than churning out mindless copy.

(BTW. Governments are already clever about this read about the HBGary Federal case. They were developing astroturfing software for the US Gov to manipulate public opinion on controversial issues.)

davidbJanuary 19, 2012 at 21:53

The Economist?

It gets great comments, and some dross, from readers all over the world, some of whom appear very knowledgable. It seems to be read by a lot of the more intelligent members of the population. They get corrected.

It is in a small magazine format making it easy to read on a train a plane or in a bath.

Try that for a few weeks. I did and I buy a 3 year sub now. Think I have been reading it for over 10 years.

One thing to be fair to the dead tree press in general, they get a few things wrong but the cost of accurately checking every fact is immense. The commentating classes are not paid, so its a kind of crowdsourcing that is going on when thousands of readers are checking your facts. It would be unreasonable to expect a journalist, who has to write copy every day, to completely fact check their every piece of work.

alanJanuary 20, 2012 at 01:30

A true journalist is about reporting the truth where research and fact checking are a basic job requirement. The press regularly fail this very basic point. And its not hard as so much information is available online publicly & privately (pay walls).

I’m not talking fact checking climate change here. I’m talking fact checking the very basics like the number of road deaths. I don’t work in the press but if I produced a report with such poor fact checking I’d be expecting a boot flying in my direction.

Churning out low quality copy is the problem; and the internet has proven to be very good at that. I love the internet, but there is a lot of crude out there.

Its simple to point an RSS reader to numerous blogs/sites and create your own “newspaper” equal in quality to the current newspaper offerings. And there are other news aggregation sources not just RSS. So why bother with a newspaper?

If the news media is going to survive it has to provide high quality copy significantly better than the average internet site. And go beyond levels of research than can be provided by a simple Google.